M. Hadi Amini

Ananth Narayan Samudrala, M. Hadi Amini, Soummya Kar et al.

Accurate topology information is critical for effective operation of power distribution networks. Line outages change the operational topology of a distribution network. Hence, outage detection is an important task. Power distribution networks are operated as radial trees and are recently adopting the integration of advanced sensors to monitor the network in real time. In this paper, a dynamic-programming-based minimum cost sensor placement solution is proposed for outage identifiability. We propose a novel formulation of the sensor placement as a cost optimization problem involving binary placement decisions, and then provide an algorithm based on dynamic programming to solve it in polynomial time. The advantage of the proposed placement strategy is that it incorporates various types of sensors, is independent of time varying load statistics, has a polynomial execution time and is cost effective. Numerical results illustrating the proposed sensor placement solution are presented for multiple feeder models including standard IEEE test feeders.

Kianoosh G. Boroojeni, Shekoufeh Mokhtari, M. H. Amini et al.

There has been an increasing trend in the electric power system from a centralized generation-driven grid to a more reliable, environmental friendly, and customer-driven grid. One of the most important issues which the designers of smart grids need to deal with is to forecast the fluctuations of power demand and generation in order to make the power system facilities more flexible to the variable nature of renewable power resources and demand-side. This paper proposes a novel two-tier scheme for forecasting the power demand and generation in a general residential electrical gird which uses the distributed renewable resources as the primary energy resource. The proposed forecasting scheme has two tiers: long-term demand/generation forecaster which is based on Maximum-Likelihood Estimator (MLE) and real-time demand/generation forecaster which is based on Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving-Average (ARIMA) model. The paper also shows that how bulk generation improves the adequacy of proposed residential system by canceling-out the forecasters estimation errors which are in the form of Gaussian White noises.

M. Hadi Amini, Orkun Karabasoglu

Electrified transportation and power systems are mutually coupled networks. In this paper, a novel framework is developed for interdependent power and transportation networks. Our approach constitutes solving an iterative least cost vehicle routing process, which utilizes the communication of electrified vehicles (EVs) with competing charging stations to exchange data, such as electricity price, energy demand, and time of arrival. EV routing problem is solved to minimize the total cost of travel using the Dijkstra algorithm with the input from EVs battery management system, electricity price from charging stations, powertrain component efficiencies, and transportation network traffic conditions. Through the bidirectional communication of EVs with competing charging stations, EVs charging demand estimation is done much more accurately. Then, the optimal power flow problem is solved for the power system, to find the locational marginal price at load buses where charging stations are connected. Finally, the electricity prices are communicated from the charging stations to the EVs, and the loop is closed. Locational electricity price acts as the shared parameter between the two optimization problems, i.e. optimal power flow and optimal routing problem. Electricity price depends on the power demand, which is affected by the charging of EVs. On the other hand, location of EV charging stations and their different pricing strategies might affect the routing decisions of the EVs. Our novel approach that combines the electrified transportation with power system operation, holds tremendous potential for solving electrified transportation issues and reducing energy costs. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using Shanghai transportation network and IEEE 9-bus test system. The results verify the cost-savings for both power system and transportation networks.

Shahab Bahrami, M. Hadi Amini

The proliferation of small-scale renewable generators and price-responsive loads makes it a challenge for distribution network operators (DNOs) to schedule the controllable loads of the load aggregators and the generation of the generators in real-time. Additionally, the high computational burden and violation of the entities' (i.e., load aggregators' and generators') privacy make a centralized framework impractical. In this paper, we propose a decentralized energy trading algorithm that can be executed by the entities in a real-time fashion. To address the privacy issues, the DNO provides the entities with proper control signals using the Lagrange relaxation technique to motivate them towards an operating point with maximum profit for entities. To deal with uncertainty issues, we propose a probabilistic load model and robust framework for renewable generation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on an IEEE 123-node test feeder. When compared with a benchmark of not performing load management for the aggregators, the proposed algorithm benefits both the load aggregators and generators by increasing their profit by 17.8%and 10.3%, respectively. When compared with a centralized approach, our algorithm converges to the solution of the DNO's centralized problem with a significantly lower running time in 50 iterations per time slot.

Badhan Chandra Das, M. Hadi Amini, Yanzhao Wu

Federated learning (FL) is gaining increasing popularity in the medical domain for analyzing medical images, which is considered an effective technique to safeguard sensitive patient data and comply with privacy regulations. However, several recent studies have revealed that the default settings of FL may leak private training data under privacy attacks. Thus, it is still unclear whether and to what extent such privacy risks of FL exist in the medical domain, and if so, "how to mitigate such risks?". In this paper, first, we propose a holistic framework for Medical data Privacy risk analysis and mitigation in Federated Learning (MedPFL) to analyze privacy risks and develop effective mitigation strategies in FL for protecting private medical data. Second, we demonstrate the substantial privacy risks of using FL to process medical images, where adversaries can easily perform privacy attacks to reconstruct private medical images accurately. Third, we show that the defense approach of adding random noises may not always work effectively to protect medical images against privacy attacks in FL, which poses unique and pressing challenges associated with medical data for privacy protection.

Badhan Chandra Das, M. Hadi Amini, Yanzhao Wu

Federated learning is emerging as a promising machine learning technique in the medical field for analyzing medical images, as it is considered an effective method to safeguard sensitive patient data and comply with privacy regulations. However, recent studies have revealed that the default settings of federated learning may inadvertently expose private training data to privacy attacks. Thus, the intensity of such privacy risks and potential mitigation strategies in the medical domain remain unclear. In this paper, we make three original contributions to privacy risk analysis and mitigation in federated learning for medical data. First, we propose a holistic framework, MedPFL, for analyzing privacy risks in processing medical data in the federated learning environment and developing effective mitigation strategies for protecting privacy. Second, through our empirical analysis, we demonstrate the severe privacy risks in federated learning to process medical images, where adversaries can accurately reconstruct private medical images by performing privacy attacks. Third, we illustrate that the prevalent defense mechanism of adding random noises may not always be effective in protecting medical images against privacy attacks in federated learning, which poses unique and pressing challenges related to protecting the privacy of medical data. Furthermore, the paper discusses several unique research questions related to the privacy protection of medical data in the federated learning environment. We conduct extensive experiments on several benchmark medical image datasets to analyze and mitigate the privacy risks associated with federated learning for medical data.

Badhan Chandra Das, M. Hadi Amini, Yanzhao Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities and contributed to multiple fields, such as generating and summarizing text, language translation, and question-answering. Nowadays, LLM is becoming a very popular tool in computerized language processing tasks, with the capability to analyze complicated linguistic patterns and provide relevant and appropriate responses depending on the context. While offering significant advantages, these models are also vulnerable to security and privacy attacks, such as jailbreaking attacks, data poisoning attacks, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakage attacks. This survey provides a thorough review of the security and privacy challenges of LLMs for both training data and users, along with the application-based risks in various domains, such as transportation, education, and healthcare. We assess the extent of LLM vulnerabilities, investigate emerging security and privacy attacks for LLMs, and review the potential defense mechanisms. Additionally, the survey outlines existing research gaps in this domain and highlights future research directions.

Md Jueal Mia, M. Hadi Amini

Federated Learning has emerged as a leading approach for decentralized machine learning, enabling multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared model without exchanging private data. While FL enhances data privacy, it remains vulnerable to inference attacks, such as gradient inversion and membership inference, during both training and inference phases. Homomorphic Encryption provides a promising solution by encrypting model updates to protect against such attacks, but it introduces substantial communication overhead, slowing down training and increasing computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose QuanCrypt-FL, a novel algorithm that combines low-bit quantization and pruning techniques to enhance protection against attacks while significantly reducing computational costs during training. Further, we propose and implement mean-based clipping to mitigate quantization overflow or errors. By integrating these methods, QuanCrypt-FL creates a communication-efficient FL framework that ensures privacy protection with minimal impact on model accuracy, thereby improving both computational efficiency and attack resilience. We validate our approach on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets, demonstrating superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. QuanCrypt-FL consistently outperforms existing method and matches Vanilla-FL in terms of accuracy across varying client. Further, QuanCrypt-FL achieves up to 9x faster encryption, 16x faster decryption, and 1.5x faster inference compared to BatchCrypt, with training time reduced by up to 3x.

Md Jueal Mia, M. Hadi Amini

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have remarkable abilities in generating multimodal reasoning tasks. However, potential misuse or safety alignment concerns of VLMs have increased significantly due to different categories of attack vectors. Among various attack vectors, recent studies have demonstrated that image-based perturbations are particularly effective in generating harmful outputs. In the literature, many existing techniques have been proposed to jailbreak VLMs, leading to unstable performance and visible perturbations. In this study, we propose Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation (JaiLIP), a jailbreaking attack in the image space that minimizes a joint objective combining the mean squared error (MSE) loss between clean and adversarial image with the models harmful-output loss. We evaluate our proposed method on VLMs using standard toxicity metrics from Perspective API and Detoxify. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates highly effective and imperceptible adversarial images, outperforming existing methods in producing toxicity. Moreover, we have evaluated our method in the transportation domain to demonstrate the attacks practicality beyond toxic text generation in specific domain. Our findings emphasize the practical challenges of image-based jailbreak attacks and the need for efficient defense mechanisms for VLMs.

Luiz Manella Pereira, M. Hadi Amini

Federated learning (FL) is a subfield of machine learning that avoids sharing local data with a central server, which can enhance privacy and scalability. The inability to consolidate data leads to a unique problem called dataset imbalance, where agents in a network do not have equal representation of the labels one is trying to learn to predict. In FL, fusing locally-trained models with unbalanced datasets may deteriorate the performance of global model aggregation, and reduce the quality of updated local models and the accuracy of the distributed agents' decisions. In this work, we introduce an Optimal Transport-based preprocessing algorithm that aligns the datasets by minimizing the distributional discrepancy of data along the edge devices. We accomplish this by leveraging Wasserstein barycenters when computing channel-wise averages. These barycenters are collected in a trusted central server where they collectively generate a target RGB space. By projecting our dataset towards this target space, we minimize the distributional discrepancy on a global level, which facilitates the learning process due to a minimization of variance across the samples. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach over the CIFAR-10 dataset, where we show its capability of reaching higher degrees of generalization in fewer communication rounds.

Yasaman Saadati, M. Hadi Amini

Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized learning approach that protects sensitive information by utilizing local model parameters rather than sharing clients' raw datasets. While this privacy-preserving method is widely employed across various applications, it still requires significant development and optimization. Automated Machine Learning (Auto-ML) has been adapted for reducing the need for manual adjustments. Previous studies have explored the integration of AutoML with different FL algorithms to evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing FL settings. However, Automated FL (Auto-FL) faces additional challenges due to the involvement of a large cohort of clients and global training rounds between clients and the server, rendering the tuning process time-consuming and nearly impossible on resource-constrained edge devices (e.g., IoT devices). This paper investigates the deployment and integration of two lightweight Hyper-Parameter Optimization (HPO) tools, Raytune and Optuna, within the context of FL settings. A step-wise feedback mechanism has also been designed to accelerate the hyper-parameter tuning process and coordinate AutoML toolkits with the FL server. To this end, both local and global feedback mechanisms are integrated to limit the search space and expedite the HPO process. Further, a novel client selection technique is introduced to mitigate the straggler effect in Auto-FL. The selected hyper-parameter tuning tools are evaluated using two benchmark datasets, FEMNIST, and CIFAR10. Further, the paper discusses the essential properties of successful HPO tools, the integration mechanism with the FL pipeline, and the challenges posed by the distributed and heterogeneous nature of FL environments.

Leila Zahedi, Farid Ghareh Mohammadi, M. Hadi Amini

Hyperparameter tuning in machine learning algorithms is a computationally challenging task due to the large-scale nature of the problem. In order to develop an efficient strategy for hyper-parameter tuning, one promising solution is to use swarm intelligence algorithms. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) optimization lends itself as a promising and efficient optimization algorithm for this purpose. However, in some cases, ABC can suffer from a slow convergence rate or execution time due to the poor initial population of solutions and expensive objective functions. To address these concerns, a novel algorithm, OptABC, is proposed to help ABC algorithm in faster convergence toward a near-optimum solution. OptABC integrates artificial bee colony algorithm, K-Means clustering, greedy algorithm, and opposition-based learning strategy for tuning the hyper-parameters of different machine learning models. OptABC employs these techniques in an attempt to diversify the initial population, and hence enhance the convergence ability without significantly decreasing the accuracy. In order to validate the performance of the proposed method, we compare the results with previous state-of-the-art approaches. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the OptABC compared to existing approaches in the literature.

Farid Ghareh Mohammadi, Farzan Shenavarmasouleh, M. Hadi Amini et al.

The explosion of advancements in artificial intelligence, sensor technologies, and wireless communication activates ubiquitous sensing through distributed sensors. These sensors are various domains of networks that lead us to smart systems in healthcare, transportation, environment, and other relevant branches/networks. Having collaborative interaction among the smart systems connects end-user devices to each other which enables achieving a new integrated entity called Smart Cities. The goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive survey of data analytics in smart cities. In this paper, we aim to focus on one of the smart cities important branches, namely Smart Mobility, and its positive ample impact on the smart cities decision-making process. Intelligent decision-making systems in smart mobility offer many advantages such as saving energy, relaying city traffic, and more importantly, reducing air pollution by offering real-time useful information and imperative knowledge. Making a decision in smart cities in time is challenging due to various and high dimensional factors and parameters, which are not frequently collected. In this paper, we first address current challenges in smart cities and provide an overview of potential solutions to these challenges. Then, we offer a framework of these solutions, called universal smart cities decision making, with three main sections of data capturing, data analysis, and decision making to optimize the smart mobility within smart cities. With this framework, we elaborate on fundamental concepts of big data, machine learning, and deep leaning algorithms that have been applied to smart cities and discuss the role of these algorithms in decision making for smart mobility in smart cities.

Farzan Shenavarmasouleh, Farid Ghareh Mohammadi, M. Hadi Amini et al.

Medical Imaging is one of the growing fields in the world of computer vision. In this study, we aim to address the Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) problem as one of the open challenges in medical imaging. In this research, we propose a new lesion detection architecture, comprising of two sub-modules, which is an optimal solution to detect and find not only the type of lesions caused by DR, their corresponding bounding boxes, and their masks; but also the severity level of the overall case. Aside from traditional accuracy, we also use two popular evaluation criteria to evaluate the outputs of our models, which are intersection over union (IOU) and mean average precision (mAP). We hypothesize that this new solution enables specialists to detect lesions with high confidence and estimate the severity of the damage with high accuracy.

Luis Caicedo Torres, Luiz Manella Pereira, M. Hadi Amini

Optimal Transport (OT) theory has seen an increasing amount of attention from the computer science community due to its potency and relevance in modeling and machine learning. It introduces means that serve as powerful ways to compare probability distributions with each other, as well as producing optimal mappings to minimize cost functions. In this survey, we present a brief introduction and history, a survey of previous work and propose directions of future study. We will begin by looking at the history of optimal transport and introducing the founders of this field. We then give a brief glance into the algorithms related to OT. Then, we will follow up with a mathematical formulation and the prerequisites to understand OT. These include Kantorovich duality, entropic regularization, KL Divergence, and Wassertein barycenters. Since OT is a computationally expensive problem, we then introduce the entropy-regularized version of computing optimal mappings, which allowed OT problems to become applicable in a wide range of machine learning problems. In fact, the methods generated from OT theory are competitive with the current state-of-the-art methods. We follow this up by breaking down research papers that focus on image processing, graph learning, neural architecture search, document representation, and domain adaptation. We close the paper with a small section on future research. Of the recommendations presented, three main problems are fundamental to allow OT to become widely applicable but rely strongly on its mathematical formulation and thus are hardest to answer. Since OT is a novel method, there is plenty of space for new research, and with more and more competitive methods (either on an accuracy level or computational speed level) being created, the future of applied optimal transport is bright as it has become pervasive in machine learning.

Leila Zahedi, Farid Ghareh Mohammadi, Shabnam Rezapour et al.

Machine learning is a powerful method for modeling in different fields such as education. Its capability to accurately predict students' success makes it an ideal tool for decision-making tasks related to higher education. The accuracy of machine learning models depends on selecting the proper hyper-parameters. However, it is not an easy task because it requires time and expertise to tune the hyper-parameters to fit the machine learning model. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of automated hyper-parameter tuning techniques to the realm of students' success. Therefore, we develop two automated Hyper-Parameter Optimization methods, namely grid search and random search, to assess and improve a previous study's performance. The experiment results show that applying random search and grid search on machine learning algorithms improves accuracy. We empirically show automated methods' superiority on real-world educational data (MIDFIELD) for tuning HPs of conventional machine learning classifiers. This work emphasizes the effectiveness of automated hyper-parameter optimization while applying machine learning in the education field to aid faculties, directors', or non-expert users' decisions to improve students' success.

Farid Ghareh Mohammadi, M. Hadi Amini, Hamid R. Arabnia

Learning to learn plays a pivotal role in meta-learning (MTL) to obtain an optimal learning model. In this paper, we investigate mage recognition for unseen categories of a given dataset with limited training information. We deploy a zero-shot learning (ZSL) algorithm to achieve this goal. We also explore the effect of parameter tuning on performance of semantic auto-encoder (SAE). We further address the parameter tuning problem for meta-learning, especially focusing on zero-shot learning. By combining different embedded parameters, we improved the accuracy of tuned-SAE. Advantages and disadvantages of parameter tuning and its application in image classification are also explored.

M. Hadi Amini, Mostafa Rahmani, Kianoosh G. Boroojeni et al.

This paper presents a new approach for identifying the measurement error in the DC power flow state estimation problem. The proposed algorithm exploits the singularity of the impedance matrix and the sparsity of the error vector by posing the DC power flow problem as a sparse vector recovery problem that leverages the structure of the power system and uses $l_1$-norm minimization for state estimation. This approach can provably compute the measurement errors exactly, and its performance is robust to the arbitrary magnitudes of the measurement errors. Hence, the proposed approach can detect the noisy elements if the measurements are contaminated with additive white Gaussian noise plus sparse noise with large magnitude. The effectiveness of the proposed sparsity-based decomposition-DC power flow approach is demonstrated on the IEEE 118-bus and 300-bus test systems.